Hollywood Goes to E3: 5 Video Games that Deserve the Big Screen Treatment

One of the big things that Hollywood has yet to figure out how to film is video games: an ongoing pet project of the industry since the early nineties. And although these movies invariably premiere to predictably disastrous results, there is a massive, untapped vain of modern-day blockbusters just waiting for somebody to figure out what to do with them on the big screen.

Traditionally, whenever people talk about “good” video game adaptations – such as they are – two projects invariably come out of the woodworks. The first is Mortal Kombat, a really fun and surprisingly well-envisioned movie based on the fighting game franchise of the same name. The second is Castlevania, which worked around the length issue inherent in the translation (ie, that video games are so comparatively long relative to movies) by not making a movie at all: instead, they made the four-part opening to a genuinely impressive Netflix series.

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While it’s tempting to argue that Hollywood should just give up on video game movies and focus on video game TV series – I myself have shouted that from the rooftops from even before Castlevania debuted – I can’t help but feel that that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sure, it’s a monumental challenge and long-form narrative naturally skirt the issue in its entirety, but there are so many of these properties out there, and they are so inherently different from one another, that I can think of plenty that would be workable under such constraints.

Dead Space – This one’s actually a pretty easy recommendation because they have actually made a good movie out of these already (two, as a matter of fact). Before the first and second games, they made made-for-tv SyFy Channel movies to act as 90-minute commercials for their products, and...